Master Of The Horn

Genius, player, teacher, jester—Dizzy Gillespie was all that jazz.

The setting might change--the New Morning Club in Paris, Ronnie
Scott's in London, Carnegie Hall in New York or the Hollywood Bowl in
Los Angeles--but the routine was always the same. Dizzy Gillespie
would show up at the gig with a pocketful of Cubans, culled from the
boxes he'd acquired during his many trips to Europe. Just before show
time, he'd hand me a couple of Cohibas, Hoyo de Monterreys or Romeo y
Julietas and say, "I was going to bring you a box of these, but I
forgot" or, "I had a box of these for you, but I didn't think you'd
like them." As if on cue, I'd freak out, complaining, "Man, why do you
keep telling me that?" Then Diz's beatific grin would spread across
his huge face and he'd take the stage. There, those famous Gillespie
pouches would inflate and release the world's most beautiful trumpet
music.

After the first round of applause subsided, he'd step to the
microphone and say, "Take me! I'm yours." He'd pause, then continue,
"Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the band." The band members
would move around the bandstand, shaking hands as if they were meeting
for the first time. Shtick, yes, but always funny. Then would come the
real treat: an hour of the glorious sound of Gillespie.

Later that evening, he'd hand me some Montecristos or La Gloria
Cubanas. Dizzy Gillespie was a scamp, a jokester, a comedian and an
inveterate tease who certainly had my number, but he was also a great
friend who always had good cigars.

In my eight years as Gillespie's road manager and occasional
recording producer, I knew a man who successfully combined the
characteristics of consummate performer, international goodwill
ambassador and developer of young talent with incredible musical
innovation. It is as an innovator that the Diz, who died in 1993, will
best be remembered, for it was he, along with other giants like
Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Oscar Pettiford, who created a new
conception of improvisational music, called bebop, that would forever
change the face of jazz. But his true genius may have shown in his
ability to reconcile the many dimensions of himself into one beautiful
personality. To understand the many facets of the man, it is necessary
to go back 80 years.

When John Birks Gillespie was born in 1917, Cheraw, South
Carolina, was a typical small Southern town of a few thousand people
situated between here and nowhere. Whites lived on one side of the
tracks, blacks on the other. During the week the area was a picture of
bucolic calm; on weekends it jumped with the music of jazz bands meant
to be danced to. Birks' father was a bricklayer during the week and a
piano player on weekends. He had a piano, a bass fiddle, a guitar, a
mandolin and drums set up in the living room, and kept his band's
instruments at home for safety's sake. Into this world stepped Birks,
the youngest of nine children, armed with an abiding curiosity that
soon led him to discover how each instrument worked. By the time he
was four, he could play but one tune on the piano: "Coon Shine Lady."
His mother must really have loved him, because he played it over and
over, and was allowed to live.

Gillespie the Elder had an interesting approach to
discipline. Every Sunday morning he would ask each child what he had
done wrong the previous week. Regardless of the answer, each got a
whipping, because the Elder was convinced that everyone must need
punishment even if he didn't know the reason. "Sometimes I'd holler,
'But I didn't do nothing,' try to duck him and hide under the bed,"
Dizzy recalled. "As soon as I bent over and tried to get away,
'Whack!' He'd hit me again. Papa never missed." The experience, the
younger Gillespie allowed, created "a tough little rebel."

Dizzy's father died of an asthma attack in 1927, leaving the
family destitute, and his mother was forced to take in laundry for
$1.50 a week. Anger was the residue, and Dizzy took it to school with
him. He was so disruptive that one teacher was driven to grab him
around the neck and choke him. Then fate took him on a new tack. When
Dizzy was in the third grade the principal acquired some band
instruments, and he was put on trombone. Being small, he couldn't push
the slide out far enough to play all the notes, but he loved it and
worked hard until, one day, he heard new and higher notes, notes that
truly thrilled him. The next-door neighbor had given his son a
trumpet. That was the sound for John Birks. He put down the trombone
forever and got himself a new instrument.

It was as a dancer, however, that Gillespie would develop his
first reputation. In his autobiography, To Be or Not to Bop
(DaCapo Press, $15.95), Dizzy wrote, "I used to make a little money
at the white dances in Cheraw. They had a place called The Country
Club above the drugstore where most white dances were held. Whenever I
heard music up there, I'd stick my head in. They'd be hollering, 'Come
on in, John Birch. Come on in and dance for us.' " His specialty was
called the snake hips, and when he snaked his way onto the floor, "the
money would start falling," he said. "I'd make two or three dollars in
just a few minutes. That was a lot of money for a young boy during the
Depression to scoop up off a dance floor." And so dancing became
another weapon in a formidable entertainment arsenal. (His unique
technique is shown to great effect in the 1947 film short Jivin' in
Bebop.) As Dizzy's career progressed, some musicians scorned his
willingness to entertain on any level. To them, as to many young
musicians of today, playing jazz was a solemn rite. Dancers, on the
other hand, loved what he did. Jimmy Slyde, the internationally
renowned tap dancer, tells me, "He thought like a dancer. The way he
would arrange and construct things seemed to always be in a vein that
I would like to capture. I was a bebop fan."

As his trumpet music improved, Gillespie's popularity grew. He
played with his own band frequently, and got gigs with other groups as
well. He was a local hero, but with a chink in his armor: he could
play only in B-flat. And, since he couldn't read music, he was
blissfully unaware of any of the other keys. Unaware, that is, until
Sonny Matthews came to town.

Matthews, a trumpet player from Philadelphia, came to Cheraw to
visit his family. Sonny had heard about Dizzy, and Diz about Sonny. A
summit between the two trumpeters was inevitable, and they decided to
converge on a tune called "Nagasaki," which Gillespie didn't
know. Furthermore, it was in the key of C, so Dizzy couldn't find a
note. "I apologized, but I felt so crushed I cried, because I was
supposed to be the town's best trumpet player," he said. The humbling
experience proved to be a turning point for the obstinate young
musician, who having vowed to learn to read music, studied and
practiced until, within a few months, he could "hit" in several
keys. His newfound musical literacy would serve him well in later
years, allowing him to work as an arranger.

In 1935, the Gillespies moved to Philadelphia, where the
small-town Southern boy encountered a new scene. Unworldly, he showed
up for his first gig with his trumpet in a paper bag (he had never
bought a case), which the other musicians thought was too funny. But
what Gillespie lacked in sophistication, he made up for in raw talent
and dedication. He worked out his ideas on the piano, a technique that
helped him to "visualize" the music. He soon found that it helped him
to freely substitute chords and harmonies within the original
melody. "All the various combinations of notes and chords are right
there in front of you," he later reflected about the piano, "like on
no other single instrument." The technique also helped him discover
how different sounds led naturally, sometimes surprisingly, into
others. "I'd take them and play them on my horn, and used to surprise
people with new combinations. When I played the trumpet, they couldn't
tell if I was coming by land or sea."

Gillespie's habit of getting up and dancing to the music also did
nothing to diminish his growing reputation as an eccentric. One day,
while Dizzy was fooling around on the piano during a rehearsal, a
trumpet player named Fats Palmer looked at his empty trumpet chair and
said, "Where's that dizzy cat?" The band cracked up, and the name
stuck.

All the same, Palmer harbored an abiding respect for the Diz, who,
he said, could take a tune and "run over it like a rabbit running over
a hill."

Dizzy soon left for New York in pursuit of the big time, with his
characteristic lack of caution: "Nothing seemed too risky to me, since
I was already known to be crazy." There he started joining in jam
sessions, an important element in the evolution of jazz. He'd play a
slew of clubs during the course of a single night--places like
George's, the Yeah Man, Smalls and after-hours clubs like Monroe's
Uptown House. He'd sit in with the Savoy Sultans, Chick Webb and
Claude Hopkins. He was coming along fast.

In 1937, he got his big break. Teddy Hill, leader of a popular big
band, used Dizzy on a recording session and then invited him to tour
Europe. That Gillespie would be filling the seat of his idol, Roy
Eldridge, gave the gig added prestige. Diz leapt at the chance. The
tour was a success, and when he got back he had a little cash, a fine
wardrobe and no job. The musicians' union in New York tore up his
working papers, citing a rule that protected musicians' jobs from
"foreigners," which, being from Philadelphia, Dizzy was considered to
be. The rising star was obliged to cool his heels for a three-month
waiting period.

As happened so often in Gillespie's career, misfortune led to
happy coincidence. Reduced to sneaking out of town on gigs, he met his
future wife, Lorraine, during a quick trip to Washington, D.C., where
she was dancing in a chorus line that toured the Theater Owners
Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. The company would start at the
Apollo Theater in New York, go to the Standard or the Earle in Philly,
move to Baltimore and then on to the Howard in D.C., always working
three to five shows a day. It was a schedule that resulted in the TOBA
circuit being dubbed "Tough On Black Artists." It was also, however,
the mecca of black showbiz.

Lorraine would later reveal that the Diz didn't cut such a dashing
figure at the time. Any cigars Dizzy smoked in the early years must
have been gifts from friends, "because when I met him he didn't have
enough money to smoke a cigarette," she recalls. "It was much later
that he began smoking those expensive Cubans."

Nevertheless, the two fell in love and, in 1940, were
married. Gillespie would later credit Lorraine's calming influence
with keeping him from distractions like drugs, which would cut down so
many of his contemporaries in the prime of their careers.

In 1937, Dizzy met another person who would help shape his life:
the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza. They dug each other
immediately. Bauza became a father figure to Gillespie and, because he
exposed him to Afro-Cuban music, was a profound influence on his
musical philosophy. Bauza would also give the young man a tremendous
career boost. After serving his three months in exile, the Diz was
back with Teddy Hill. Hill's was one of the house bands at Harlem's
premier jazz showcase of the era, the Savoy Ballroom. Work was steady
until 1939, when Teddy's band was playing in the Savoy Ballroom
Pavillion at the New York World's Fair. The band members were doing a
lot of sets, and considered themselves seriously underpaid. They
complained to the union and got fired. Dizzy was out of work, but not
for long, as Mario Bauza came to the rescue.

Cab Calloway was "The Man" in 1939. His band was booked three
years in advance and traveled in private railroad cars and on
chartered buses. Bauza, who was playing with Calloway at the time, dug
Dizzy so much that one night he gave up his trumpet chair so that his
protégé could sit in and Cab could hear what was
happening. Cab added Dizzy to his band immediately, and their
relationship was solid until the legendary "Spit Ball Incident of
1941."

To understand how it happened, you have to appreciate that to
call the Diz of that period the enfant terrible of jazz was to put it
mildly. Dizzy was renowned for his antics, and he loved to terrorize
musicians while they slept. Giving someone a "hot foot" was no big
thing. Nor was putting the end of a lit cigarette between someone's
lips or lighting cellophane on a guy's chest. So, one night in
Hartford, Connecticut, when the trumpet player Jonah Jones started
throwing spitballs at the drummer, Cozy Cole, Calloway, who wasn't
onstage at the time, blamed Dizzy. Who else? Cab went nuts, and the
more Dizzy denied the charges, the madder he got. A scuffle ensued,
and out came the knife that Diz always carried. Moments later, there
was blood all over Calloway's trademark white tails. Though Calloway
wasn't seriously hurt, Dizzy found himself out of a job once more.

Again, Dizzy Gillespie never looked back. He'd been jamming at
Minton's Playhouse in Harlem with pianist Monk, bassist Pettiford and
drummer Kenny "Klook-Mop" Clarke. Together they were creating the
music called bebop. "Musically, we were changing the way we spoke to
reflect the way we felt," Dizzy said. "New phrasing came in with the
new accent." Among the elements of the genre were constant
improvisation, lightning tempo and a harmonic scale marked by a
preponderance of flat notes (although Diz would famously claim, "We
don't flat our fifths, we drink them"). The speed of play and the
fierce competition between musicians demanded incredible virtuosity of
anyone who dared to participate at all.

The contemporary trumpeter Graham Haynes, the son of Gillespie
collaborator Roy Haynes and a lover of Punch Rothschilds (I know
because he smokes mine all the time), says that when he first picked
up the horn, "Dizzy scared the living shit out of me. I felt
like--I'll never be able to play like that. The licks were flying
around at 200 miles an hour. I don't know how he did it." Dizzy's
recordings continue to astound the young trumpet players of today.

By 1942, it had become clear to Diz that one element was still
missing in his career: a suitable partner to help him express his
ideas. This figure soon materialized in the person of Charlie
"Yardbird" Parker. Dizzy had met "Bird" in his hometown of Kansas City
while on tour with Cab. They practiced together and discussed ideas
whenever Dizzy passed through K.C., but the techniques they had been
developing separately wouldn't mature until they joined Earl Hines'
band, which included Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.

As it happened, Hines and Eckstine had given fate a little nudge,
enticing each of the musicians into the band by saying that the other
was going to join. The ruse was forgivable. It created one of the
greatest collaborations in the annals of music. The recordings Dizzy
and Parker made are a testament to the gigantic change the two wrought
in the evolution of modern jazz. Dizzy changed for all time the way
the trumpet is played, and Bird did no less for the saxophone. The two
musicians played together off and on and would remain friends until
Parker's death in 1955.

The 1940s were years of phenomenal activity for Dizzy. He
performed with bands big and small: Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins,
Benny Carter, Les Hite, Lucky Millender--the who's who of American
jazz band leaders. He wrote and arranged for Woody Herman and Jimmy
Dorsey, and was musical director for Billy Eckstine's big band. He and
Oscar Pettiford co-led the first bebop band at the Onyx Club on West
52nd Street in Manhattan, with Billie Holiday on the bill. Max Roach
was on drums and George Wallington was the pianist. With Parker, Dizzy
put together a band with the spectacular Bud Powell on piano, Roach on
drums and Curley Russell on bass at a club in New York called the
Three Deuces. He wrote compositions that would become jazz standards:
"Salt Peanuts," "Night in Tunisia," "Woody 'n' You" and "Manteca." He
brought the Cuban master congero, Chano Pozo, into his big band and,
in so doing, Dizzy became the father of Latin jazz. Almost everyone
Dizzy worked with achieved greatness: Charlie Christian, Milt Jackson,
Ray Brown, Charlie Rouse, John Lewis and James Moody, to name a few.

As his music caught on, Dizzy attained cult status, his goatee,
horn-rimmed glasses and beret invited imitation by jazz fans all over
the world. In fact, the uniform we now think of as the beatnik look is
a derivation of fashion à la Diz. Slang spoken by Dizzy and his
bebop friends also found its way into the language of the day.

Not everyone loved the music, however. A reviewer for The New York
Times in the late 1940s described it as "sensational, tasteless and
insincere...without logic of development or even temporary continuity
of idea. Strong doubts," he went on, "may be entertained that it is,
in any serious sense, even recognizably music." Bebop proved
inaccessible even to accomplished jazzmen. Louis Armstrong called it
"malice." James Moody himself recalls his first impression of the
music: "We had heard 'Salt Peanuts' that he and Charlie Parker had put
out," says the saxophonist and flute player. "We would say, 'What the
hell is that?' We didn't know, but we were hanging on to it." Moody
knew enough to come running when in 1947 the great Gillespie suggested
that he try out with the band as soon as he was discharged from the
U.S. Air Force. He didn't make it on his first try, however. Someone
said he didn't play loud enough. "Then, two months later, I got a
telegram that said, 'You start with us tonight.' " Moody debuted with
a "killer" band and continued to work with Dizzy Gillespie, on and
off, for the next 45 years.

The diminishing economic returns of running a big band and his
wife's ultimatum--it or her--caused Gillespie to disband the Dizzy
Gillespie Orchestra in the 1950s, and his career took a new turn, that
of musical industrialist. With a friend, Dave Usher, he formed Dee Gee
Records. Dizzy figured that he could wear all the hats: owner,
producer, artist and manufacturer. "It was a wonderfully creative
period," Usher said. "We recorded tunes like 'Birks Works' and 'The
Champ.' We did novelty things like 'School Days,' 'Lady Be Good,' 'Oop
Shoo Be Do Be' and 'Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac.' " Dee Gee Records also
made the first recording of a kid named "Sonny Boy" Wilson. The tune
was "Danny Boy," and "Sonny Boy" later came to be known as Jackie
Wilson, the '50s rhythm and blues icon. "Dizzy Gillespie was the first
jazz musician to own his own label," Usher claims. He also kept a
stash of cigars at Usher's Detroit pad. The last batch were Tara
Nuestros Amigos #4.

Another facet of the Gillespie character was soon to develop:
diplomat of jazz. In 1956, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell
Jr. arranged with President Dwight Eisenhower for Diz to take a big
band on a tour of the Near East, Middle East, Africa and Asia under
the auspices of the State Department. This was the first time that a
jazz musician had represented the United States on a cultural
mission. In many of the countries the band visited, jazz was new. When
Dizzy arrived in Beirut for two concerts, a very nervous promoter
awaited him. The guy didn't know if he'd get an audience. But he
needn't have worried. In fact, he had to add a third show.

Gillespie would reprise his role as ambassador throughout his
career, bringing jazz to new areas and audiences. The trumpet player
Lester Bowie says, "Dizzy spread the music with his personality. And
he worked 300 nights a year."

It was on that first tour that Diz gave Quincy Jones one of his
first big breaks by making him musical director. Dizzy was always one
to encourage new talent. He provided opportunities for many of us,
past and present, and it's possible that some of us would not be in
show business today, if it weren't for him. Mike Longo got a lift from
Gillespie as a 21-year-old unknown house pianist at the Metropole, a
hopping jazz club in New York in the early '60s. During an interview
with International Musicians magazine, Dizzy was asked if he had heard
any young musicians whom he liked, and he mentioned Longo. "I didn't
even know him yet," Longo recalls. A few years afterward, while
playing at an East Side club, Longo looked out into the audience and
there was Dizzy. "The next day, I get a call from him, saying, 'Meet
me at the union.' So, I went down to meet him, and he said, 'When I
get back from Europe, I'm gonna need a piano player.' I said, 'You got
one,' and that was the beginning of it. To be honest, if I had been
Dizzy, after the first night I would have fired me. But Dizzy took it
on himself to train me."

The bassist John Lee describes a crash course into the world of
Gillespie: "Bob Cranshaw told me to call Dizzy, and he said, 'Can you
go to Memphis tonight?' I said I could, and he said, 'Meet me at the
airport.' And that was with no rehearsal, nothing. But Dizzy was such
a tremendous teacher, he talked me through the night, and any music he
didn't have, he'd walk over and tell me the changes while we were
playing. It was exciting and a challenge."

My own career was similarly blessed by Gillespie. I'd always
dreamed of producing records, but it was never more than a dream until
the Diz made it happen. He called me up: "T., we're going to cut a
tune for a movie called The Big Score. Fred Williamson's doing it. Get
it together now!" After much Sturm und Drang, all that remained of my
efforts on the sound track was a percussive effect--welcome to
Hollywood. But the experience put me on a new career track, and I
ended up producing three Dizzy Gillespie albums: New Faces
(GRP); Closer to The Source (King/Atlantic), which featured
Stevie Wonder on keyboards and harmonica and was nominated for a
Grammy; and Endlessly (MCA), which went No. 1.

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Gillespie continued to widen his
audience through television appearances on the "Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson," "The Ed Sullivan Show," "Person to Person with Edward
R. Morrow" and the "Bell Telephone Hour," to name a few. Then he
turned to the world of film, where his orchestra played the sound
track for Shirley Clarke's deeply moving 1963 film, The Cool
World; he also wrote the music and provided a voice along with
Dudley Moore for an animated film in 1964 called The Hat. All
the while he piled up honors, being named best trumpeter by Jazz
Hot, Downbeat and Playboy magazines' jazz polls
several times.

It was in the 1970s that cigars became a serious pursuit for
Dizzy. Lorraine Gillespie describes his initiation: "A fellow named
Whitey used to collect clothes for recently arrived immigrants and his
uncle had a cigar store. Dizzy gave him the clothes, and Whitey gave
him a couple of boxes of expensive Cuban cigars," Lorraine recalls
with a precious laugh. Gillespie now had a use for all the fine
clothes that he'd bought around the world.

My own introduction to Gillespie involved a smoke. I saw the cigar
before I ever saw Diz, and whatever it was, it was big. It was 1981,
and I was an assistant stage manager for George Wein's Kool Jazz
Festival. Diz was pissed as he entered the theater, but I didn't know
it, and in my best tremolo I said, "Hello, Mr. Gillespie." He cut me
cold. I never found out why he'd been angry, but somewhere along the
way as our relationship progressed he became my friend, daddy and
granddaddy all wrapped in one. Neither was I the only one who felt
this way. On more than one occasion, as we'd walked through Times
Square, people would yell, "Dizzy Gillespie. Is that you?" The Diz
would smile and puff those cheeks, and that would be it. The folks
would come running over. It was always a groove.

As Dizzy's road manager, I traveled all over Europe and Japan with
him. I was with him on his second trip to Cuba in 1986, and, of
course, I fell in love with cigars. John Lee turned me onto them while
we were hanging out in a nightclub at the bottom of the Hotel Nacional
in Havana. I saw the beautiful shape and smelled the gorgeous
aroma. "Man, what is that?" I asked. "Call the waiter. He'll get you
one," Lee said. The rest is sweet, smoky history.

Curiously, in his later years, I learned that the magnificent
Dizzy Gillespie no longer liked making records. He found the recording
environment claustrophobic. As he told me, "When I started out, the
cat put a microphone in front of us and said, 'Play.' " By the 1980s,
retakes and the overdub had robbed the exercise of its
spontaneity. Diz wanted it to be hit and split, and he could come up
with all manner of excuses for not showing up. Dizzy would say, "My
lips hurt" or "I'll be there in an hour" and never show. When I sent a
driver for him, he would send him away after telling the man, "Dizzy
don't live here." I called more than one driver a liar before I
figured out what Diz was up to. The next session he'd show up looking
all angelic. He was a trip, and I loved him.

When the great John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie passed away on Jan. 6,
1993, of pancreatic cancer, those of us who knew him mourned his death
on many different levels. We lost not only a great talent but a huge
heart. Wynton Marsalis recalls, "Dizzy Gillespie was a genius who
reinvented the way we play the trumpet." But he confessed that it
wasn't as a trumpeter that Gillespie had most affected him. "He loved
music, and not just his involvement in it," Marsalis adds, "and was
always very encouraging to Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan,
John Faddis. He encouraged me tremendously. And he left a good taste
in the mouths of the audience. He never forgot he was playing for the
people."

Alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe says, "He always made me feel like
he respected me. Even with his enormity, he never made me feel like he
was looking down on me."

"He was a pioneer," said drummer Tony Williams, who passed away in
February, a Saint Luis Rey, Hoyo de Monterrey and Cohiba smoker who
played with Dizzy and Davis.

James Moody, who was at Dizzy's bedside when he died, says,
"Everywhere I went for the first time, I went with Dizzy. Dizzy's
impact is still there, although people might not realize it. Even now,
I'll hear something and say to myself, 'Hmm, that's what he meant.'
Not a day goes by that I don't miss him."

Dizzy ended his autobiography, To Be or Not to Bop, by saying,
"The highest role is the role in service to humanity, and if I can
make that, then I'll be happy. When I breathe the last time, it'll be
a happy breath."

Rest easy, Diz. You're cool.

Producer, manager and writer T. Brooks Shepard lives in New
York City.